Our Journey, Day 54
This week I'll be driving down to Mankato in the southern part of Minnesota, to run a couple of Open Ed sessions. And to see my son, who is an undergrad down there now. I mentioned the historians met last week and I decided on the courses I'll be teaching in the spring, my final semester at BSU. Two if them will be online and two in person. The ones I'll be teaching in person are US History II and the History of World Religions. Both are scheduled for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; actually they're back to back in the same building. So that's fairly convenient. The online courses are US History I, which I'm teaching this semester in person, and World History I online, which I've never taught before.
This semester is between a third and halfway. I'm traveling this week, then I'll be at the OE Global conference for a week in mid-October. Then Thanksgiving break. The dorms close at BSU and at Mankato, so I'll be making another trip down there to pick him up. Then another trip to Mankato about two or three weeks later, to pick him up for break when the semester ends. That's a pretty busy schedule of road trips. Good thing I like driving and listening to podcasts or audiobooks.
In the meantime, I've been thinking I ought to make a schedule and block out time for each of the tasks I'm working on. I used to use an app called Tyme 3 to keep track of the hours I worked, and it made me feel good when I got in a solid week of 60-plus. I felt like I was disproving the old prejudice that college professors don't work that hard. I'm less interested in doing that, but I do want to make sure I get things done. Since I tend to get buried in one thing for hours at a time, the best way to insure that is probably to block some time for each of the tasks I want to get done this week, and then try to work the blocks.
Rather than getting all elaborate and trying to rely on an app to make that happen, I think I'm just going to draw a week on a notebook page with squares and rectangles in it for time blocks. Now that I'm really not organizing my day around courses and meetings on campus, I need to create some structure. That's an interesting change, now that I notice it. Explains why some of the things like grading student work, that I used to do during office hours, have been lagging a bit. I need to block a time to do them. It's sort-of weird to me that some activities were just buried in an "identity". I was a college professor, so I went to an office on campus. Prepped for my classes. Drank coffee. Chatted with my colleagues in adjacent offices. Now that identity is ending, so I have to deliberately make time for things like that, if I'm going to continue doing them.
I think I'll try to get in the habit of opening and closing those blocks with a little check-in that records how I felt about the activity before and after doing it. That way, I can remind myself that some of the things I've been avoiding getting done really aren't that bad. And if I notice there actually is something I really don't like doing, I can consider that when I'm making choices.
What I want to avoid is making plans based on inaccurate assessments of what I like spending my time on. For example, I think it would be cool to have written a book about transatlantic freethought radicals, or the northern pine forest, or the network of oligarchs and government operatives in American history, but if I find I can't bring myself to actually enjoy doing the work, that ought to tell me something. Right now, I think I would like the work, but I'm lazy. Sometimes it's easier to kick back and watch a movie. But I think it can be just as entertaining to work on these projects. So I should do a reality check on that, and then plan accordingly.